Texas prepares for crush of executions

Charles Hood and Lester Bower knew better than to hold out much hope that the U.S. Supreme Court was going to put a stop to their executions when it issued a key ruling on lethal injection last month. After all, in the years the two men have been on Texas' Death Row, they have seen hundreds of inmates go to their executions.

Now, in the wake of the court's ruling clearing the way for use of the lethal three-drug cocktail, Hood and Bower face execution in coming months as the nation's busiest death chamber gets back to business. After Derrick Sonnier's June 3 execution date, Hood is scheduled to die on June 17 and Bower on July 22.

"The way we looked at it on the row was that it gave us a little bit of additional time, that's all," Bower, 60, said during an interview from Death Row. "It was clear this argument was not going to be a winner."

Said Hood, 38: "None of us really expected the Supreme Court to make a difference. ... But for a while, anyway, everything stopped. Your friends weren't being killed."

Though the Supreme Court case on lethal injection arose from Kentucky, the death penalty in America is, for the most part, a Texan phenomenon. Of the 1,100 executions since capital punishment resumed in 1977, more than one-third—405—have been carried out here. Last year, Texas accounted for more than 60 percent of executions nationwide.

25 executions seen this yearTexas has scheduled 10 executions from June through September, more than half of those scheduled across the country, according to a Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokeswoman. Lawyers who represent Death Row inmates in Texas say they expect the state to execute 25 to 30 prisoners this year and as many as 50 next year.

"It's the typical thing when you get a bottleneck and the bottleneck ends. It all comes gushing out," said David Dow, a professor at the University of Houston Law Center who defends Death Row inmates. "And the line outside the death chamber, as it were, has gotten longer."

Dow described the period before the Supreme Court's decision as a "calm before the storm." He said the de facto moratorium gave lawyers a much-needed respite.

"This," he said, "is what it was like to be a death penalty lawyer in any other state."

Now attorneys are trying to deal with the crush of cases, identifying which ones require greater resources, according to lawyers.

"The challenge is that we only have a limited amount of time," said Rob Owen, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a veteran death penalty lawyer. "Every hour you devote to looking over a case that's been through the appeals process ... is an hour you can't spend on someone who is at the front end of the process and who might benefit more. It's a world of limited resources and a lot of people in desperate need of those resources."

Unlike other times when the Supreme Court's deliberations slowed the pace of executions, such as when it was deciding whether executing the mentally retarded or prisoners who committed their crimes as juveniles was constitutional, its most recent decision spared no one.

For supporters of capital punishment, the seven-month break in lethal injections was "justice delayed," in the words of William "Rusty" Hubbarth, vice president for legislative affairs for the Texas-based victims' rights organization Justice For All.

"We're not running a cheering section for the death penalty. We're basically saying the will of the juries should be carried out," he said.

He said supporters were not concerned about the coming rush of executions.

'I am preparing myself'Four of Texas' first 10 scheduled executions are cases from Dallas County, where the district attorney, Craig Watkins, has set up a unit to exonerate wrongly convicted inmates and has publicly expressed his unease with the death penalty. Still, he said in an interview, the executions will go forward.

"Currently," he said, "that's the law of the land, and we have to abide by those laws."

Watkins said his office reviewed the cases again and found no evidence to suggest the inmates were innocent. He said in the future his office will use a "different way of determining if a person is eligible for capital punishment."

Hood and Bower have had execution dates before, only to get stays. Hood, a former bouncer at a topless club, arrived on Death Row in 1990 for the murders of a patron and his girlfriend. Bower arrived on Death Row in 1984 for shooting four men execution-style.

With about 370 inmates on Texas' Death Row, only 16 have been there longer than Bower.

Both men, in interviews, insisted they were innocent. But they said they know, too, that an innocence claim may not save them in a state so determined to carry out executions.

"When you get [an execution] date, you're not happy about it," Hood said. "You are trying to seek out your spiritual side, writing letters to your family, trying to prepare."

Bower was even more downhearted.

"My wife and I take the position that we expect the worst and we hope for the best," he said. "I've been here long enough that I've seen all kinds of things happen. ... I am preparing myself, physically and mentally, expecting that on July 22 they will do what they say they're going to do."